Because our mission is indirect (we serve those who serve), we put a great deal of rigor into measuring community impact. Our mission of increasing organizational capacity by lowering long-term IT costs and increasing IT functionality is measured in a straightforward manner.
If we refurbish a personal computer received through an in kind donation and make it available to a nonprofit for $80 when it has a conservative market value of $225, then the impact of that transaction was $125. And if we do that 100 times in a year, we have generated $14,500 in community impact. (We have served more than 150 organizations and distributed more than 1,150 PCs and more than 950 LCD monitors through our hardware redistribution program.)
If we provide 40 hours of a senior network engineer’s time toward a project at $35 per hour when the low end of the market for this skillset is $85 per hour, then the impact of that engagement is $2,000. Likewise, if one of our partners makes a consultant available to a nonprofit for a software evaluation and selection project at a rate of $60 per hour when the conservative market value for that resource is $125 per hour, then the impact of that engagement is $65 per hour. (We maintain partnerships with for-profit companies in the community who want to give back to the community and agree to operate under a negotiated rate card to allow 501tech to maintain visibility into all transactions including the right to audit actual costs.)
If we find and implement a cheaper but comparable anti-virus solution or negotiate a software purchase agreement that lowers cost, we’ve accomplished our mission of reducing long-term IT costs and created significant impact.
(NOTE: Because the cost of any product or service varies significantly, we use conservative estimates in computing the value of each of our five programs.)
Click here to see a list of organizations served by 501tech.
technology for good